MANILA: Many powerful politicians linked to corruption in Philippine flood control projects will be in jail by Christmas, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said on Thursday, after dozens of officials were named as suspects in a multibillion-dollar graft scandal.
Public outrage has grown since August in the Philippines, after an audit ordered by Marcos revealed that billions of pesos worth of flood-control facilities were substandard, poorly documented, or nonexistent.
An independent fact-finding commission Marcos created has filed criminal complaints for graft and corruption and plunder against 37 suspects — which include powerful senators, members of Congress and wealthy business people — as well as more than 80 construction company executives and nine government officials for allegedly evading taxes totaling nearly 9 billion pesos ($152 million).
“Before Christmas, many of those named here … will have their cases completed. They will be locked up. They will not have a Merry Christmas,” Marcos said during a press briefing in Manila.
“We don’t file cases for optics. We file cases to put people in jail.”
